Recently I've been receiving negative feedback from the boss regarding my baking abilities. It wasn't directly in my face, she was just generally showing her displeasure about the recent batches of baked goods through the many group chats she has created, not really naming names but it was obviously directed at me because I am the one who's doing the majority of the baking.
Obviously, I am not happy about any of her feedback, because she's essentially telling me that I suck at what I am doing.
"Tried the recent batch of baked goods a few days ago and they were bad, I mean really bad."
When I first read that message, I though her bad "I meant really bad" was really bad, like the taste of the cakes were so horrible that should a random customer take a bite of it, the dormant cancer cells in their body will trigger and instantly give them terminal stage mouth cancer.
Turns out it was only a tad too dry.
There's a huge difference between "bad, and I mean really bad" and a cake just being dry. I mean I get that a dry cake isn't a good thing, but it's not as if when you eat the cakes that I've made, it feels like you've eaten the Sahara Dessert. I've bought a cake from a shop before and know what a horrible dry cake taste like, that one was horribad, the ones I made weren't necessarily moist, but they were definitely not dry enough to be deemed "really bad".
I came across a blog post about our cupcakes just a few hours ago, written by a food blogger and the worst type of food blogger one I could possibly find.... the kind that doesn't know what he or she is talking about.
I've come across one who was doing a review of the restaurant I was working at last year, talking about how she felt the pancake tasted artificial because of the supposed use of banana essence and she failed the dish because of the use of artificial banana essence, the only problem with her review though, was that there wasn't any banana essence in the pancake, or anywhere in the kitchen for that matter, the only bananas we use are real bananas, that banana taste you are tasting comes from the actual fruit that has been coated with sugar and caramelized , if you can't even discern the taste between artificial banana essence and a real banana, you should really be blogging about other things other than food, like the misadventures of your non-functioning taste bud.
So anyway, just a few hours ago, I came across another blog, reviewing the cupcakes he or she bought from the bakery I was working at and the post was written probably 2 weeks ago. This person is just a fucking lazy blogger, he bought a Hazelnut Cupcake and called it a chocolate cupcake, copied the description of the cupcake from the chocolate flavored cupcake which wrote....
"a rich chocolate fudge butter cream atop a vanilla cake with a chocolate fudge center..."
The hazelnut cupcake uses a chocolate cake base, even a colorblind could tell the difference between grey and a darker grey. Bloody idiot.
...he/she also then referred to a carrot cupcake as a pistachio cupcake and wrote the caption under the picture...
"The Pistachio is telling of the flavor".
...but your taste bud can't? The pistachio were only the decorations on top of the frosting, there wasn't any pistachio in the actual cupcake itself.
and then he/she called the banana chocolate cake, "Death By Chocolate" , a flavor which has been discontinued before I even started working there, and goes on to write...
"Death by chocolate quite nearly...."
... when there's banana in a chocolate cake, as a food blogger who reviews food on a regular basis, that's something that you should be able to catch on, but there was no mention of the banana taste whatsoever, I assumed he/she just continued eating the cake thinking it was a chocolate cake through and through.
The blogger's final words were that the cakes were dry. If you can't even get your flavors right or even differentiate a vanilla cake from a chocolate cake, then your entire review has lost it's credibility to me.
Guess she and the boss got one thing right, the dryness of the cake. So she asked to throw all the current batch of cupcake base away, the reason being that it wasn't up to standard and that despite her chat with us about maintaining quality, it turned a deaf ear,the irony here is that she doesn't practice what she preach.
She expects her workers to maintain quality on the things we bake when she herself is making the conscious decision to cut cost by skimping on the ingredients she wants us to use.
I got pissed when she decided to throw away 200 cupcakes that I have stocked up in the freezer because they weren't up to standard. I don't normally get to be able to stock up the cupcakes in the freezer to the brim normally, and when I do, I feel a bit accomplished to be able to actually keep up with the demand, so when the Chef decided to deem 200 cupcakes as sub par, I was not pleased at all about it. It essentially ruined my mood for the entire week.
We do have a freezer in the bakery stocked up with cupcake bases, that whole "baked fresh" bullshit written on the box is a lie, unless your definition of fresh is "few weeks old". It taste fresh but it's definitely not baked fresh, the power of a freezer.
That what happens when the boss decides to keep introducing new items into the menu non-stop and overload her small kitchen crew's workload. Baking items fresh are no longer possible with the amount of items we have to bake on a daily basis.
At this point, the variety of items on the menu is actually quite ridiculous. The shop is now essentially a jack of all trades but master of none. I don't really like how the shop is presented, I am not a fan of how they decorate their cupcakes in all honesty, or any of their baked goods for that matter, it's not a place I am proud to work at, the only reason I am sticking with this job is because of the experience I need before I can actually go work at a more reputable bakery... or if I actually gain back some common sense, find work in an Interior Design firm and earn a decent salary.
For all I know, I might not even make it past this month if the boss decides to fire me for the wastage and hire someone else, although I highly doubt that because she's really squeezing her current manpower to the maximum, if one left, the whole bakery is going to be screwed, like it did when the previous baker decided to quit less than a year after he got the job, his reason was that the boss was too demanding.
But if she did fire me, than I can at least tell myself I have given Baking a shot and it's time to actually get a real job, so I'm not going to beg for her to keep me if she does decides to fire me. Look for another baker for all I care and give me a valid excuse to actually quit so I can look for a proper job that can allow me to actually afford a house and car in the future.
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